


She Watched Him Fly

by fireflysglow_archivist



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-14
Updated: 2006-02-14
Packaged: 2019-04-29 05:56:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14466462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fireflysglow_archivist/pseuds/fireflysglow_archivist
Summary: A series of Zoe/Wash drabbles.





	She Watched Him Fly

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Firefly’s Glow](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Firefly%27s_Glow), and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project in 2018. I tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are the creator and would like to claim this work, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Firefly's Glow collection profile](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/fireflysglow/profile).
> 
>  **Author's notes:** Spoilers through the Big Damn Movie.

  
Author's notes: Spoilers through the Big Damn Movie.  


* * *

She Watched Him Fly

## She Watched Him Fly

The gorramn pilot was eyeing her again. Barely a week in, and he was eyeing her up. Zo did not like it, and furthermore, she did not like the pilot. He was . . . he just . . . well, she couldn't rightly say why she didn't like him, but it was there all the same, a strange, creepifying feeling that would not leave her alone. He made her uncomfortable, and it wasn't the sort of uncomfortable she was used to. Not like how she felt about the new mercenary - that was good, honest distrust, pure and simple as anything, but what the pilot made her feel . . . 

The problem was, she had a sneaking suspicion that when she did, it would not turn out to be as close to dislike as she thought it was. 

It began when she first watched him fly. 

Wash loved the ship. He loved every inch of that old, beaten bird, maybe even more than Mal did. And it came through in his flying. Zo had been on ships before, and few pilots took half the care that Wash did when he flew. He barely engaged the autopilot at all. He'd spend hours sitting in the cockpit, just looking out there at the stars, just enjoying the view and the flight and the lights in space. 

He had good hands. Good, strong hands that could ease Serenity into the slowest of declines, or pull her into the sharpest of ascents, hands that could be strong and gentle according to what the flying required. He touched that ship with more love than some men touched their women, and Zo wondered if he would ever love anything more than he loved Serenity . . . 

She realized, with a sudden shock, that she was getting jealous of a ship, over a childish man with a moustache like a walrus and dinosaur toys that cluttered up the bridge, who flew like a bird and looked at her like she was a goddess, and had good strong hands that - 

That was when Zo knew that, one way or another, the moustache had to go. 

When it finally went, it took Zo a while to realize it was gone. 

She was vaguely aware, when Wash walked into the bridge, that something was very, very different, but by now she'd gotten to where she could ignore the gorramn shrub on his face and looked instead at his eyes, or his hands, or at anything else that would keep her from having to stare at the thing growing from his upper lip. When she realized what was different, she allowed herself to blink a few times, then a good long stare. 

"You got rid of the moustache," said Zo, the unflappable warrior woman caught off her guard. 

Wash ducked his head and laughed, a boyish gesture to go with the hideous shirts and the dinosaurs, and who knew he had such a nice smile under that gorram nose hair? 

"Got tired of it," he said, and Zo waited for him to tell the rest of the truth. "Plus, I could tell you didn't like it." 

"Weren't no call to go doin' something like that for my sake." 

Wash just blushed. 

"So I was thinking," he said, and Zo did not make the obvious quip, but he smiled anyway as if she had. "I've only been ogling you for two months, and I shaved my soupcatcher for you - how about I treat you to a proper date?" 

Zo's face was as blank as ever as she quipped at him, and he quipped back, and fifteen minutes later, they were kissing each other like they'd been doing it all their lives. 

When they finally paused long enough to breathe, Wash's hands were in Zo's abundant hair and Zo was pressing him up against the wall of the bridge, and Serenity was veering slightly off-course. 

"You had better take me to a nice place," Zo warned. 

He did, and Zo made Wife Soup for him that night. Of course, he didn't call it Wife Soup. He just called it the best thing he'd ever tasted. It wasn't until later that they decided that took too long to say. 

The captain walked in on them the first time they had sex. 

It was, after all, rather irresponsible of them to do it in the bridge, and it was only natural that someone come to see what all the noise was. That it was the captain was unfortunate, but when the first mate and the pilot forgot themselves and consummated their devotion in the cockpit, embarassing things were bound to happen. 

"Oh God," said Zo, whose blouse was open and whose pants were hanging on the back of the pilot's chair. 

"Oh God," said Wash, whose orange-and-green shirt would probably never be found again. 

"Oh God!" said Mal, and fell down the stairs. 

It was a few months before Zo and Wash could laugh long and hard about that, and by then they were married, and could laugh about whatever they wanted together. 

Zo had accepted long ago that she might die in her line of work. Her death she was prepared for. But Wash was untouchable, Wash was the port of safety flying that ship of theirs, and Wash was only in danger when all of them were. 

All things considered, she was lucky to get a moment of pain at all. She was lucky she could panic even a little bit before she had to go back to work, and be the warrior woman again. But that was theraputic also, because grieving wives did not often get a chance or have the constitution to shoot their husband's murderers. 

Zo had always known that life wasn't fair, but it seemed suddenly that she was the object of more universal cruelty than anyone else in the universe. She was not a romantic woman. She had never expected marriage or true love. So to deliver unto her the man who was not perfect, but was perfect for <i>her</i>, and then to take him away when she had barely begun to love him enough was a cruelty she could not live with, could not tolerate in this universe. 

Behind the crates, her cold and concentrated mind faded away to a sea of hot, angry rage, and before she knew it she was up, shooting as she walked, closer to the faces of the monsters who were responsible for her husband's death. In that moment, she meant them to be responsible for hers. 

<I>You took my baby away. Now send me after him, you bastards. Send me home to Wash before I kill every last one of you.</i>

She didn't cry until she went to their room for a change of clothes and opened the wrong drawer by the first accident she'd ever made on purpose. 

She pulled the entire drawer out and sat with it and stared long and hard at those beautiful, garish shirts, folded flat and empty with their bright colors and husband-smell still lingering in the fabric, and she pulled them out one by one and cried over them all, flat forever, no beautiful, garish man to love them again. 

And everybody heard, but nobody came, because Zo didn't cry, and to say so would be to say that Serenity was falling out of the sky, and without Wash, nobody could be sure it wouldn't. 

Evan wants to know about his daddy again, and it kills Zo to hear him ask if he was brave and if he was smart and if he was good because Wash's son should know that without her having to tell him so. 

He plays with his father's dinosaurs and spreads them across the dining hall so Jayne trips over them and curses near to make their ears shrivel up, and then Evan has to run or face the Hero of Canton, and he has his father's laugh and his father's smile and his mother's eyes, and lordamighty if he isn't the most beautiful little boy in all the 'verse. 

And Zo lives for and dreads the quiet moments when he climbs into her lap and says "Tell me about Daddy," and then she has to remember the bright shirts and the mustache and the Barn Swallows and Crazy Ivans and Wife Soup and thrilling heroics and daring escapes, and Evan wants to hear about the first time they met and the funny things he said, and Zo knows he'll ask about the death one day, but not now. Not now. 

Evan is going to be a pilot or a soldier or both, he says, going to fly a ship like the daddy he doesn't know. River teaches him, but her mind is still too strange even for children, and Zo will have to send him to a proper school one day, but not today. Not tomorrow. Not until he's grown up enough to ask about death, and there are a few more years before that at least. 

And when it's time, she will go with him, because her son is more important to her than Serenity, more important than Malcolm Reynolds, more important than the freedom she's almost died for, because he is all she has left of the man she still loves, and if he wasn't there there's a chance that Zo might stop remembering and avoid the pain - but she knows, even without Evan, to forget would be much worse than to remember. 

When Zo dies, she will not be old. 

It does not matter how, or where, or even when. Hers is a dangerous life, and one day, her luck will run out. Or it may be that it will take a turn for the better. 

Wash will be there to meet her. And Zo cannot wait.

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title:   **She Watched Him Fly**   
Author:   **Andy Longwood**   
Details:   **Standalone**  |  **PG-13**  |  **het**  |  **8k**  |  **02/14/06**   
Characters:  Zoe, Wash   
Pairings:  Zoe/Wash   
Summary:  A series of Zoe/Wash drabbles.   
Notes:  Spoilers through the Big Damn Movie.   
  



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